Google announced today that Google Accounts will soon have OpenID identifiers, too. Like Microsoft, they've currently deployed only an experimental version. Currently, it's only supported for RP sites that pre-register using a web form, though when this drew fire on the OpenID Mailing List Google folks gave the impression that this would open up after the experimental phase. They're also experimenting with using email addresses as identifiers, though it seems that their provider doesn't have any special support for this right now. They're also, I believe, the first provider to support Attribute Exchange.

LiveJournal has quietly upgraded its OpenID consumer to support OpenID 2.0. Since LiveJournal was the first OpenID consumer, it's nice to see it adopt the new version. Now users of Yahoo!, Microsoft and (in theory) Google can use their identifiers to sign in to LiveJournal and leave comments. Since this blog runs on LiveJournal, you can try this on my comment form if you like.

It's good to see the last few existing "big" centralized identity providers rolling out OpenID support. While some continue to be upset that none of these are accepting OpenID as a relying party -- and I agree, that is a shame -- at least Yahoo! ID, Google Accounts and Windows Live ID are brands that users are used to seeing on login forms and this will hopefully provide motivation for other RPs to implement OpenID. I think email addresses as identifiers is the next step, and if these big providers that also provide email can get on board with one of the proposals OpenID will become even more attractive to RPs as it could optimize rather than complicate their user enrollment experience.

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Yeah, it's a shame that you can't do that right now. For what its worth, at least one of the engineers at LiveJournal agrees that this would be desirable, but they've got other priorities right now. Maybe some day...